G. Thompson
Sept. 28 Further applications of kairos
Miller, "Kairos in the Rhetoric of Science" (Canvas) (kairos indicates that discourse is an event rather than an object--example is development of DNA's structure by Watson and Crick)
Kairos and Christianity
"Kairos," Kittel and Friedrich, ed. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Canvas)
Tillich, "Kairos," from The Protestant Era, 32-51 (Canvas)
Sipiora, "Kairos: The Rhetoric of Time and Timing in the New Testament," 114-27
Sullivan, "Kairos and the Rhetoric of Belief," (Canvas)
Oct. 5 First essay due
Immanence of the eternal in the here-and-now
Hopkins, "God's Grandeur," (Canvas)
----------, "As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame," Canvas
Auden, "Musee des Beaux Arts," Canvas
Kairos and art
Coessens, "Musical Performance and 'Kairos': Exploring the Time and Space of Artistic Resonance" (Canvas)
Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (kairos and aura) (Canvas)
This week I want us to talk about inspiration. Now we're getting to the real connections between kairos and literature. It might have been nice to start here, especially given that you have probably settled on your paper topics already. But I think we had to work through what we've read previously in order to deal with this aspect of kairos. And perhaps this aspect will be useful to you as you do your seminar paper for the end of the semester.
That paper is to be a new production, not a retread from a previous course. You do not have to write about any of the works we've read this term (I'd prefer not to read anything on Hamlet, personally). As we work through the next three weeks of readings, be on the lookout for something you can use.
The next assignment for 499 is your narrative about the English program as you have experienced it. That is due Oct. 19, i.e., in three weeks. Suggested length is 1500 words, but you can do more with this if you like. It's a requirement but not something to be graded for the course. Assume that I know you as the author, but when the narratives are used to evaluate the program, your name will be redacted. You should therefore suppress anything which would identify you specifically--"That time I set fire to the trash can in Prof. Munn's class provoked an over-reaction . . ." I see two purposes for these narratives, one specific to you and one more about the program. For you, take as your assignment the need to describe coherence in your experience of the program. How have the various courses you've taken in the English literature program come together as a whole--and if they haven't, what do you see as the explanation? For the program, what aspects do you now feel have contributed to the program's value? Are there things you feel have been missing which you would like to see addressed as we move forward? Please avoid issues related to specific professors ("Fire Thompson!" "Much too fond of Thomas Pynchon!").
Writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson liked to speak of poets as makers--the root word according to them comes from making, and for Emerson the making is the origination of language. We'll read the article about kairos and Emerson in two weeks, but he comes from a way of thinking about poets in the Romantic period, as visionaries and prophets. Prophets not always in the colloquial sense of someone who foretells the future, though that is sometimes there--but prophets who look at the world with new vision, seeing what is perhaps there for the rest of us but unremarked--and testifying. They do so because they are inspired, seeing a different context, seeing an opportunity to say what is fundamental and important, and seeing something which must be said.
"Walt, you contain multitudes, why don't you let it out then?"
I want this phase of the class to explore connections between this sense of kairos--not only the opportunity but the obligation to speak visions--and its roots, which I believe can be found in the somewhat later meanings of kairos, not about openings in armor or woof and warp, not about right timing and right amount in a rhetorical sense, but about the moment put to ordinary people when confronted with the extraordinary and divine. Since we are looking at the Western, specifically Anglo-American tradition that we come from, the relevance here is kairos and Christianity, but as it connects with the idea of inspiration.
Talk about inspiration from personal experience . . . a sensation of having a balance between control and discovery--for me this comes when writing, when that moment comes that the pieces have fallen together, I have "touch" with the pieces of my subject, and the words fall into place at exactly the right time. I know from experience that when that state, or mood, or illusion, is on me, I will be happiest if I go with it, and I resent interruptions which pull me away.
Let Coleridge speak here:
In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's Pilgrimes:' 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.'
The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter. . . .
The residue was described, 20 years later, as a fragment, "Kubla Khan." Coleridge doesn't claim that this fragment was the result of divine inspiration or the muses, but rather a dream vision resulting from his intoxication from opium, which came to him as a poetic composition of 200 lines or so, broken up by the nameless Person from Porlock. (This is mocked a couple of centuries later by Stevie Smith:
Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.
It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong
(But often we all do wrong)
As the truth is I think he was already stuck
With Kubla Khan.
He was weeping and wailing: I am finished, finished,
I shall never write another word of it,
When along comes the Person from Porlock
And takes the blame for it.
It was not right, it was wrong,
But often we all do wrong. . . .
[the poem continues]
But I think we can grant at least metaphorically the sensation of inspiration and the frustration at its interruption.
Ancients spoke not entirely metaphorically about the muses, who brought the impulse and ability to write poetry to writers. (One for epics, one for lyrics, along with muses for other areas such as history.) While there are writers who talk about the importance of hard work (1% inspiration, 99% perspiration; conception is ecstasy, labor is hard work), others speak about inspiration as a necessary spark to creativity, sometimes aided by alcohol or drugs.
One thread in thinking about kairos, then, which we will be going into in a few weeks is Romantic poetry, which is our tradition's first exploration of this notion of insight. We'll anticipate it through the concept of epiphany as set out by Joyce in Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and present as a compositional principle in Dubliners. But I just came from looking at "Kubla Khan" in Engl 201, so it was fresh to hand.
We'll go in this direction next two weeks with kairos in arts, but I want us to foreground that with looking at inspiration in a Christian context. Kairos, as we saw last week, shifts over time from a vulnerable place in armor / an opening in weaving, to propriety or opportunity as the dominant senses, to (by the 4th century B.C.E.) time, contrasting kairos with chronos, and giving us the primary sense held by Kinneavy and others.
Readings this week deal with a few centuries after this. The Septuagint (3rd century B.C.E.) was a translation of the Hebrew writings (what we call the Old Testament) into Greek, which was the lingua franca of the ancient world at the time. As noted in a previous class, the word time from the famous passage from Ecclesiastes was translated as kairos. The time of the Spirit's arrival on Pentecost is kairos. While it still maintains the meaning of opportunity, kairos is infused with the sense of inspiration, of being filled with the Spirit, of genius or even possession. And it's analogues of that concept that we should consider at this point in the semester.
What is the relevance of the Bible to literary study, anyway?
The Great Code. Northrop Frye observes (obviously) that "The Bible is clearly a major element in our own imaginative tradition . . . It insistently raises the question: Why does this huge, sprawling, tactless book sit there inscrutably in the middle of our cultural heritage . . .?" (xviii) He speaks specifically--as Frank Kermode does in more detail, in The Sense of an Ending--of kairos as end-time, apocalyptic time. Both the Bible, and kairos within the Bible, find their way into literary works. So one thread of our discussion should be apocalypticism in literature.
We've already discussed the sense of kairos as the time of opportunity, which if you miss may never come again. [Supply examples from this--Jesus' various invitations or demands to people to follow him.]
Also previously discussed, kairos in terms of plot events: See Sipioira, 119, quoting Smith--in addition to the "right time," "a time of tension or conflict, a time of 'crisis' implying that the course of events poses a problem which calls for a decision at that time. . . . [also], a time when an opportunity for accomplishing some purpose has opened up as a result of the problem that led to the crisis." Cf. Ellison, "King of the Bingo Game."
We've also alluded to kairos in the sense of inspiration, being filled with the Spirit, or various metaphors for it. Cf. "Kubla Khan" by Coleridge: I didn't put this on the syllabus, though I might have, not for Kubla Khan and his stately pleasure domes, so much as for the anticipation of inspiration on the part of the narrator, who when filled with the musical incantation of the maid from Abyssinia could create within those pleasure domes, and become an object of awe-filled reverence by those around him. [read close of the poem]
Sipiora:
114 "The first noun from the mouth of the Son of God is kairos." Mark is the earliest of the four gospels.
[Note the part about why Jesus speaks in parables, so that the outsiders will hear but not understand. It's not kairos for them.]
We may not be accustomed to thinking about the influence of Greek rhetoric in Christian theology. "For purposes of scriptural analysis, let me suggest that kairos is a rich concept, with a multiplicity of meanings and a rich legacy of resonance including timing, opportunity, location, season(s), and profit." (115)
"kairos as eschatological time" (115)--reference of eschatology. Can we think of literary works which point toward some sort of apocalypse? See Kermode on this topic. King Lear comes to mind.
116 Some of this is familiar to us already--chronos is simply time, "The uniform time of the cosmic system," according to Smith (quoted on 116). Kairos, we know, is the right time, or the good time (eukairos); there's also kakakairos or the wrong time, and akairos or time without opportunity. Chronos is sometimes explicitly contrasted with kairos. "Christians must learn to distinguish chronological time from kairic time precisely because the occasion of kairos carries strategic imperatives for faith and action." (119) Example in Luke 21:8 about getting the time right.
Isocrates--kairos as center of paideia--"live well by speaking well and honorably." (117) Phronesis--common wisdom.
Plato has Socrates in The Phaedrus match discourse to the auditors' souls. This is more than just waiting for the right moment to exert influence to win an argument. "Such knowledge is critical to Paul's rhetoric" (125)
Advantage or profit as another meaning (120)
Emergency or crisis (120-21)
Culmination or adjudication (121) These last two connect to the sense of kairos as eschatological.
"A precarious time of grave solemnity" (122)--"this reading suggests that the Christian, always and already, faces eschatological choices in the decisions of daily life." Motif of macro / micro; cf. also the idea that the just society has to originate and be reflected in the just individual.
"Time, as chronos, proceeds linearly until He authorizes the coming of the ultimate kairic moment" (122)
"The notion of 'God's time' adds an element of mystery and uncertainty into the calculus of human behavior and action, particularly as it refers to God's ultimate judgment of human behavior." (122)
Shift here to the Theological Dictionary as a backup to Sipiora's article: much of this is familiar to us, but it has nuances worth comment.
The dictionary gives the words in Hebrew and Aramaic which are translated in the Septuagint as kairos. It means "decisive point in time, but with more stress on divine appointment than ethical demand."
I find this interesting, as it connects with the distinction drawn by Matthew Arnold between what he calls Hebraism or an emphasis on duty, in contrast to what he calls Hellenism, the pursuit of truth or rationality (Arnold's Hellenism is Platonic). "The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience." (from Culture and Anarchy) God says, Do it, because I said so, not because of an inner necessity which chimes with a larger purpose. When He sends Abraham out to sacrifice his son, as a test of faith, Abraham sharpens his knife. He doesn't say, "I don't get it."
(Cue up "Highway 61" by Dylan.)
In support of this concept,
"the temporal sense of "decisive point" is common, often with a stress on the fact that it is divinely ordained."
Being a prophet is a frustrating job, as those you are prophesying to often don't get it or are resistant to the Message. "Jerusalem does not recognize the kairos when Jesus comes to save it (Lk. 19:44). The masses fail to see the character of the kairbs that is present with Jesus (Lk. 12:56). The presence of this kairos is thus given a new intensity."
Again to the Romantics--they are seeing what others do not, and it doesn't have to involve a Stately Pleasure-Dome. It might be a nearly nameless little girl out in the Lake Country:
She lived apart, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and oh!,
The difference to me.
"The simultaneity of end and present fulfilment poses a demand and confers an ability for recognition and outworking in love (Rom.13:11; Gal. 6:10; Eph. 5:16; Col. 4:5)."
As for "end," see below, Sipiora, on the eschatological dimension of kairos. Telos, or the end, looms large in the Bible: the present moment (chronos) is given its significance only sub specie aeternitatem or when viewed through the result in eternity. Thus the billboard signs to be seen all across the South and rural America--"Where will you spend eternity?" That view, the view from eternity, is kairos breaking into the present moment, more under threat of punishment from those signs, more from the "outworking in love" in the New Testament. (Our Trump Country brethren are much more fond of Old Testament-style punishment than of New Testament-style love and acceptance.)
"Jesus' own life stands under the claim of the kairbs. He discerns the moment and decides accordingly (Jn. 7:6, 8). This kairos is not just a favorable opportunity. Jesus awaits it from the Father and thus enjoys true certainty."
This moment of decision taken in absolute certainty sounds arrogant, from the outside. We can hear its tones in Song of Myself--"Walt, you contain multitudes, why don't you let it out then?" or "Walt Whitman, a cosmos, . . ." Coleridge's pique at the Person from Porlock, Wordsworth's satisfaction at being among the Few who know about Lucy's existence, are part of the certitude which comes from one's own perception of being in the kairotic moment.
"The stress may sometimes be on the content, so that the element of human decision is weaker, but that of God's ordination is no less clear. Thus God fixes the time for the manifestation of the Logos (Tit. 1:3), for the attestation of divine love in Jesus (1 Tim. 2:6), for the epiphany of Christ (1 Tim. 6:15) and the reaping of his people (Gal. 6:9)."
Examples continue. The messages from the prophets come with such certainty because they feel themselves possessed of inspiration. I think we are more accustomed to inner doubts because of our subjectivism, so that the occasional person who speaks with certitude may get more of a hearing. Think Jim Jones here, or any preacher in one of these Megachurches. I think Trump's idea of a Strong Leader comes from this perception of certitude--he must see it in Putin and in the other dictators he praises, and it's a quality he lacks and wishes he had.
(So we're passing from the certitude which comes from the confidence of inspiration to those intense and private doubts which come from thinking you should be inspired, but are not. Think of Neo in the first Matrix movie--is he the One? it doesn't feel like it, and the Oracle says, Sorry, kid, you're not him.)
Jesus must have had those moments--Messiah, Shmessiah . . . but they don't make the cut into the Gospels. For some reason I'm thinking of John Berryman here and the internalized voice of his Mother:
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
Berryman here is at the opposite extreme from messianic inspiration.
There are further words related to kairos in akairos, eukairos, and proskairos ("temporally limited").
Sullivan next:
"proclamation is a kairotic rhetoric"--
That's what poets-as-prophets do, proclaim. The rhetoric involved, according to Sullivan, "leads to belief (pistis), not to judgment (krisis) or scientific knowledge (episteme). "The ancients believed this kind of rhetoric is produced under inspiration, or divine madness, a madness that does not lead to deception (apate) but to truth (aletheia)." (317)
Poets as experiencing divine madness. This may be the product of an invalid syllogism:
All As have quality B;
This C has quality B;
Therefore this C is an A.
That's invalid because C may not belong in class A. Consider:
All cats have four legs;
My dog has four legs;
Therefore my dog is a cat.
In this instance:
Prophets are subject to divine madness;
Coleridge experiences divine madness;
Therefore Coleridge is a prophet.
But what is at issue for us, in literary creation, is the perception of inspiration, not the reality. If Coleridge believes himself inspired, and communicates that through his poems and through his comments on his poems, then that is an aspect of literature we need to attend to because we respond to it.
What is the nature of belief, consequent upon inspiration or this aspect of kairos? I think it is conviction leading to action. Poets of the visionary mode don't want just to produce a pretty, aesthetic object. They want to change your life.
Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
The Whitman persona of Song of Myself is going to give us the key to belief.
"More specifically, I will describe proclamation as a non-rational or supra-rational rhetoric bound up with the concept of kairos. When successful, such rhetoric produces what may be called a kairotic experience, which presents a single alternative, filling the entire consciousness of the auditor, producing belief when the auditor says 'yes' instead of 'no.'" (317)
More a matter of Sophistic rhetoric than Platonic or Aristotelian rhetorics. That makes sense for us, given our discussion so far.
Mention of Kinneavy and Hesiod as previously discussed--"together these two meanings suggest a third component, namely opportunity." (318) This then slides off into prepon or appropriate.
Streams:
1. Pythagoras--"leads to an understanding rooted in an epistemology that accepts the possibility of knowing the nature of Being." Pythagoras' notion of kairos is not just about timing, but "also gauged appropriateness in relation to a 'cosmic-ontological order'" (318). Harmony, order, decorum--this may fit with that side of Romantic epistemology which stresses being at one with Nature. Harmony and balance in this view is a part of justice, "giving each person his or her just desserts" [sic]--my just dessert would probably be tiramisu; Donald Trump's is apparently two scoops of ice cream, when everyone else gets just one.
2. Gorgias--human beings cannot know Being; emphasis on "temporal and situational aspects of kairos. "poetic timing that produces connections and thus a special logos, a point of indecision encountered when competing opinions are presented, and a sort of irrational power that makes decision possible." (319) The first, poetic timing, is something we will look at next week. These three reside in the speaker's mind, the audience, and "the dynamic situation occasioned by the release of the logos." This latter looks like Bitzer to me.
"The logos of a poet is a 'powerful lord'"--incantation; cf. ending of "Kubla Khan." This is deception, "but it creates the similitude of truth because the poet discerns the connections possible in a given situation."
This attention to the moment of composition is something we haven't approached yet this semester. Sullivan quotes Untersteiner here: "'The poet must set before himself as his aim the knowledge of the right moment (kairos), that is, of the instant in which the intimate connection between things is realized, which is therefore "the law which allows him to arrange things he knows in the right place and in accordance with their significance".'" Sullivan continues: "Although one can call this the kairos of invention," [as does Thomas Rickerts] "it is more aptly termed the kairos of inspiration, for the logos being created is not something that can be produced by techne." (319) Logos means the word or rationality, but it also means truth. Gloss needed as well for techne--it means both art and craft or skill--Greek didn't distinguish between art, which we associate with fine art, and craftsmen making useful devices. A poet is a maker, and others make things not with words. "It has a clear link with romantic concepts of genius and vitalism or with divine madness." There we are.
An important distinction later in this ¶--it's "not the Pythagorean reflection of an objective cosmological order; rather it is an order grounded only in the poet's imagination." (319)
Reference in the second meaning to dissoi logoi. "Persuasion from logos occurs when something like a poetic vision overpowers the auditor, as a drug that affects the psyche"; this is in contrast to doxa (opinion), which "depends on rational arguments." (319) Persuasion from logos is "deception"; the second "falls short of certainty" through human limitations. Logos "creates an immanence that doxa does not have."
Being poised between opposites leads to the kairos of having to act without perfect understanding (320).
Conclusion, 320--read. Before Aristotle, kairos is seen as "part of a world where magical powers had real effects"; with Aristotle, it becomes a techne for rational persuasion and thus "began to mean little more than propriety of time." (320) Kairos in its New Testament use, however, returns us to irrational, magical persuasion to action. "We are in a mythic-poetic culture rather than a rationalistic culture." (320)
Reference in this part of the article to Tillich.
Sullivan lays out four uses of kairos in the New Testament:
Rare usage to mean, simply, time. Cf. timely or beautiful.
A brief window of opportunity which passes quickly
Time as season--slightly expanded from a point.
A time of fulfillment--this is the eschatological meaning discussed previously.
"We see that the word described rhetorical time as rhythmic, punctuated by temporal opportunities, embedded with longer seasons of power, culminating in two great fulfillments. . . . It is this sense of the numinous (the awareness of a spiritual presence) that makes an association of primitive Christian rhetoric with pre-Socratic and Sophistic rhetoric possible." (323) Brett, discussion of Arnold's notion of times of expansion and times of contraction, come to mind here.
Distinction between a skill and an art (empeiria / techne). This is less related to our discussion.
"Rational rhetoric calls the auditors to make a judgment; it is a rhetoric aimed at krisis (judgment) rather than at pistis (belief). (324)
Reference to epideictic rhetoric (rhetoric designed to praise or blame, meant to display skill).
Roots of epideictic--the word meaning to shine or show forth. "the rhetoric that released the radiance of Being." (325) Rosenfield "insists that the external world has its own values and that it calls upon us to recognize 'the quality inherent in object or deed'." Bitzer, anyone? "'when value dwells in the object, it "cries out" for recognition and remains recognition-demanding regardless of any praise heaped upon it'." (325) This will apply directly to Hopkins, in next week's reading.
Original derivation from animism--a cosmos "'literally "in-spired" by some primordial breath of life'" (325). "'Unlike the arguer who forces the audience to submit to the power of cold logic, the epideictic orator charms his listeners. He enchants them so that they, like him, are drawn to embrace reality in a mood of thankfulness at the divine mysteries revealed by discourse to the contemplative mind.'" (325)
Compare the statement by the Apostle Paul (quoted on 326)--Paul has abandoned techne in favor of invoking logos.
"The orator can, at bnest, create a kairos which unleashes the glory of God"--ref here to Hopkins.
What are we to think of this dichotomy between rational judgment (krisis) and irrational belief (pistis)? We who reside in the context of Aristotelian rationality, the university? There's a reason that poets of Romantic excess don't find teaching positions in universities (the exceptions stand out, e.g., Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington).
"Kairotic rhetoric produces, under the influence of inspiration during the opportune moment, a sense of the numinous; this experience can be associated with the power of imagination creating a vision that fills the consciousness . . . The auditor, then confronts a force that does more than address his or her intellect." (327)
Only yes or no is possible. "If the auditor's response is no, the vision begins to dissipate and is regarded as an apate (deception). If the response is yes, then a metanoia occurs." (327) (Metanoia is a "change in one's way of life resulting from penitence or spiritual conversion.")
The world is shifted--I'm thinking of the Korgis' song (covered by Beck at the end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) "Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime": William James, "to those who experience conversion the world apparently undergoes an objective change, a sense of newness 'beautifies every object'"; scales fall from the eyes; "In Gorgian terms, the apate becomes a permanent fantasy; in Kuhnian terms a paradigm shift occurs which gives the observer a new way of interpreting life experiences." (328)
So is this a real change? A shift in attitude? A temporary fantasy?
Aletheiac rhetoric--aimed at truth ? -- "the mythic-poetic form to which both Gorgias and Plato reacted"--it is likely to produce deception. "Gorgias suggested doxastic rhetoric as an alternative, the reduction of all language use to the level of probabilities and opinions. Plato suggested a scientific rhetoric, elevated to the level of a techne, that followed dialectic and therefore served truth. Aletheiac rhetoric, conversely, cannot be a techne; still it claims to reveal the truth." (329)
Tillich--
The Protestant Era--mid-20th-c. book: "A summons to a consciousness of history in the sense of the kairos, a striving for an interpretation of the meaning of history on the basis of the conception of kairos, a demand for a consciousness of the present and for action in the present in the spirit of kairos" (32)
Tillich sees chronos as the time of "bondage . . . to this world, to nature and to her eternally recurrent course and change, to the ever continuing return of times and things." (33) Tillich wants to make a case for a "mystical" view of the world, against the dominance of the secular, through insisting upon kairos as a reorienting of history.
Contrast between Orient and Occident
Philosophy of history--belief that "the end of time is near" (35) Break from absolute conceptions of history (38).
Relative conceptions:
Classical--being under God. Modern form is Christian humanism (39)
Progressive--belief in continuous progress, gradualism; may be positive, defending the status quo; or negative, either cynical and desperate, or intent on creating something new (cf. Shaw here).
Connection of these two in alternation--dialectical. Division into theological, logical, and sociological.
46-47 "Kairos in its unique and universal sense is, for Christian faith, the appearing of Jesus as the Christ. Kairos in its general and special sense for the philosopher of history is every turning-point in history in which the eternal judges and transforms the temporal. Kairos in its special sense, as decisive for our present situation, is the coming of a new theonomy on the soil of a secularized and emptied autonomous culture."
"The consciousness of the kairos is dependent on one's being inwardly grasped by the fate and destiny of the time. It can be found in the passionate longing of the masses; it can become clarified and take form in small circles of conscious intellectual and spiritual concern; it can gain power in the prophetic word; but it cannot be demonstrated and forced; it is deed and freedom, as it is also fate and grace." (48)
Blake: "Eternity is in love with the productions of time." For eternity read chronos; for time, kairos.
Will comes from a lack. If we had everything we desire, when we desire, we would have no will to do or have anything else.
Miller
Miller, Carolyn R. "Kairos in the Rhetoric of Science." In Witte, Stephen P., Nakadate, Neil, and Cherry, Roger D., eds. A Rhetoric of Doing: Essays on Written Discourse in Honor of James L. Kinneavy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. 310-27.
This doesn't add to the list of meanings for kairos, but instead serves as an illustration of the concept's applicability. Rhetoric of science--an illustration of how kairos applies to the rush to publish the structure of DNA.
This ties into my performance discussion: "Understanding the relationship between historical context and particular characteristics of discourse is essential to a specifically rhetorical interpretation of a scientific or any other text. This claim is an argument for the centrality of kairos to rhetoric. As the principle of timing or opportunity in rhetoric, kairos calls attention to the nature of discourse as event rather than object; it shows us how discourse is related to a historical moment; it alerts us to the constantly changing quality of appropriateness." (310)
Avery's paper was published nearly a decade before that of Watson and Crick. No one noticed, partly because of the dense style, partly (mostly?) because the time was not right.
Does this story fit better with Bitzer or with Vatz?
"As an opening, kairos becomes for rhetoric a discursive void, much like Bitzer's definition of exigence as 'an imperfection marked by urgency'" An opening can be constructed as well as discovered. (313)
Kairos was a "key concept" for the Sophists: They "conceived of situation as an indeterminate confusion in which opposing statements . . . could be made, in which a rhetor could attain probable knowledge but never certainty, and in which the art of rhetoric that helped in this process was itself necessarily unsystematic. [Based on Gorgias] The judgment of history on this rhetoric has been harsh, in large part because of the ascendance of a philosophical tradition that valorizes universal knowledge over the situated and certainty over the probable--a tradition, in short, that has elevated science precisely because it seems to achieve these ends." (313-14)
"kairos provides both an opportunity and a requirement for taking action within 'the contradictory multiplicity of the real world,' as Mario Untersteiner puts it (113). [Cf. also Kjeldsen.] He describes how kairos operated in the thought of two of the Sophists. For Protagoras, drawing on the Pythagorean tradition, kairos provided a principle of harmony that resolves conflict" (314).
Positivist philosophy has little use for kairos, as it develops synchronically (315). (Karl Popper) Movement is by conjectures and refutations.
Re Kuhn: "Normal, puzzle-solving science is cumulative, in the way of Baconian positivism (Structure 52); in solving well-defined puzzles with well-understood methods, normal science makes progress both 'obvious and assured' (Structure 163) because progress is defined by the commitments that permit the work to be done. And a scientific revolution also produces progress, again by definition, since the group that chooses the new paradigm must see it as progress." (316)
In a view associated with Bitzer, "a kairos develops with the accumulation of anomaly and, during a crisis, demands resolution." (316) But a Vatz version would be "a version that would emphasize the different sorts of scientific and rhetorical opportunities available during periods of normal science and anomaly accumulation, as well as crisis and theory-choice. This version emphasizes the creative work that is to be done in puzzle solving or in pursuing the implications of an anomaly. Success for Avery is to be thought of as willingness to challenge the force of an existing paradigm or as tenacity and meticulousness in observing anomalous phenomena, not as boldness in resolving a crisis with a synthesizing hypothesis."
How does one perceive a crisis?
"Kairos, then, can be understood as operating in two arenas: it is both a conceptual or intellectual space, understood as the opportunity provided by explanatory problems, and a social or professional space, understood as the opportunity provided by a forum of interaction." (323)
Kuhn is revolutionary, Toulmin evolutionary.